My collection began on Christmas Day 1980 with three Marvel Comics in a stocking, soon blossoming into a dozen titles a month. The current issue of Avengers at the time was #205, but I found a spinner rack at a family drug store which had kept #200 months past its cover date of October. Woah, look at that cover! So many Avengers. And inside, George Perez' fabulous art depicting dinosaurs and spaceships attacking the mansion. Too cool! The part about Ms Marvel's mysterious pregnancy went over my head, and my mom was unsettled by the panel of adult Marcus calling her "mom." Whatever, back to the dinosaurs.

So yeah, I have a lot of nostalgia for this issue even now that I'm older and can appreciate the furor that Marcus' seduction with "a subtle boost from Immortus' machines" raised among adult readers. This page finds Ms. Marvel and Wonder Man (two character names that Marvel Comics trademarked before DC could) discussing her post-partum recovery, while Beast takes her rapidly aging son son all the sports gear in the mansion.

This page ticks all the boxes. It's a great character moment showing two heroes in my favorite of their several costumes. Perez (the top of the page credits him with breakdowns on this oversized issue, but Dan Green kept the finished work looking like George) was at the height of his powers in the 1980s. He gave full backgrounds to six of the seven panels, including an amazing mess of machinery on the bottom panel that must have taken Green forever to ink. The third panel echoes Dave Cockrum's splash page from Ms Marvel #20 (1978), which showed Carol admiring her new black costume in the mirror.

Perez pulls out all his cinematic tricks to vary the panel compositions. Moving through the page, we get a hand close-up, a "cowboy shot" (mid-thighs up, used in Westerns to show the gun belt, but here showing off Simon's jacket and rocket belt), a worm's eye reveal of Carol in her costume, a two-shot close-up, a bird's eye shot, an asymmetrical two-shot, and the final long shot. Though the two characters are talking to each other, both of them face the reader in every single panel, except the one in which the mirror on the closet door reflects their faces Scripter David Michelinie provided a nice play on words with "balance" to transition between the last two panels.

The first panel describes Avengers Mansion as "parkside," referring to Central Park in Manhattan. Other sources specifically place it at the corner of East 70th Street and Fifth Avenue, the parkside mansion of nineteenth century industrialist Henry Clay Frick, which now houses the art museum known as the Frick Collection.

The published page was constructed from three sheets; apparently the second tier (the fourth panel) was either inserted or redrawn late in the process. As a result, two bands of tape hold the page together, and over the decades, their adhesive has seeped through to the front of the paper, leaving two tan horizontal lines. They are not as noticeable in person as in the scanned version, though. Perez (R.I.P.) signed the bottom margin at some point.

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